Animated Gifs

[NeoMorph]

Now I have most of my code for my XBMC working ok I thought it was time to start adding the eye candy and have hit a snag.

When importing an animated gif it asks "Do you want to use the animations" and I clicked yes. I then used it on a button and in NRD it looks good. I then save the CCF. NR automatically restarts and the button appe... er... DOESN'T appear I mean.

How do you use animated gifs on an NR panel?

[Rob H]

Works for me (at least on a button) - yep, and on a frame.

Did you replace the image on an existing button? That can cause a problem as it will probably try to use the original size which will confuse things.

If that's not it can you try with another animated GIF?

[NeoMorph]

In NRD it's showing up as animated (and flashing nicely) yet when I save it NR shows no graphic.

I got around it by cheating... made some flash buttons instead. They will probably be better in the long run for performance anyway plus they are easier to do that animated gifs.

Hmmm... I managed to get the animated gifs working... had to close NR and re-open and they appeared.

Weird.

[NeoMorph]

*BIG SIGH*

There is definately something screwy with animated gifs... just had another case where animated gif are not appearing and animating in NR but shows up animated in NRD F2. I even tried closing down NRD and NR and reopening NR that worked on another CCF... no luck. The gif animates fine in IE and ImageReady but NR refuses to display it. It's looking like another in the long list of display bugs.


This is definately another bug to be added to the "essential fixlist" Tim...

Example attatched again....

I think I'm going to take a break from trying to do any kind of animation because I'm having no luck and it's just getting me down.

1. Animated Gifs don't display properly.
2. Intermittant appearing transparent images (green oval)
3. Animated frames stutter like it's on an old PC even on Athlon 3400+ with 2gb Ram
4. Animated frames frequently get "stuck"
5. You can't draw over flash movies which makes integrating flash into panels difficult unless your panel is more boxy than an old Volvo.
6. Animated Avid strings corrupt any graphics that appear over them.
7. Manually moving elements results in them being corrupted.

There are others but those are my problems regarding animation support or should I say lack of animation support. Trying to develop panels is really tough with those bugs and the poor frame animation code looks really bad. They should be a lot smoother to say the least.

When is the next release of NR estimated because for a pre-release it's not stable enough by far... it's still mid beta imho...

[Ron]

The attachment you posted does not contain an animated Gif.... Opening with NRD shows only text, no image.

[NeoMorph]

Ron, I just opened up the ccf on my end and looked at the loaded image gallery and you are right there doesn't seem to be any image loaded.

But when I load up the button... TADA... I see an animated gif blinking away quite merrily. I then clicked on the image and if you click in the second position in ImagePicker it's highlighting that there is an image there.

Weird... but there definately is an image there.

[NeoMorph]

Just downloaded the ccf... the animated gif is definately there (open the button and you can see it animating)

[NeoMorph]

I just decided to export the gif but when I exported it using "Export All Images" it exported it as a PNG... Shouldn't it have exported it as a gif?

The resultant png file has all the images from the gif but stacked vertically in a single image and no transparency.

Edit: Just had a thought... Tim recently fixed an alpha transparency image not displaying bug (the Green Oval problem) and I was wondering if this could be the same problem here as the images are transparent with animated bits (so I could overlay them onto another image which I couldn't do with Flash).

[tmorten]

I don't think animated gifs would go through the same code flow as what I fixed, so I'll have to look into this one separately. With regard to the image export, I doubt that code flow contemplated animated gifs when Ben wrote it -- that's something that will have to be added.

Best,
Tim

[Ron]

Now I see it,.. tiny dots running diagonally... must have not been wearing my glasses.